HollywoodandFine.com Foul-mouthed without being particularly funny, involved without being compelling, Judd Apatow’s “This Is 40” wants to be deeper than it really is. Which is an Apatowian trademark. Apatow aspires to be a contemporary Frank Capra – albeit one with fart and blowjob jokes. But his movies are always about …
HollywoodandFine.com David Chase’s “Not Fade Away” is one of my favorite films of 2012, a heartfelt but clear-eyed look at what it’s like to be a teen-ager who falls in love with rock’n’roll. More accurately, it examines what it felt like to be a teen in 1963, when the Beatles …
HollywoodandFine.com There’s nothing wrong with “Jack Reacher” that couldn’t be helped by losing 15 or 20 minutes of exposition and other kinds of explaining. Sort of like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books: They’re long and involved but only sporadically interesting. Reacher himself spends far too much time on the kind …
HollywoodandFine.com You’ve no doubt heard about a little movie called “Zero Dark Thirty,” which suddenly is the controversial odds-on Oscar favorite. The controversy has to do with a couple of scenes of torture – or “harsh interrogation techniques,” as the Orwellian Bush-era new-speak had it. They occur early in the …
HollywoodandFine.com An icon of the baby-boom generation, Barbra Streisand teams up with the free-spirited shlub-star of the Millenials, Seth Rogen, in “The Guilt Trip,” a movie whose wit is never as sharp as its heart is warm. For a comedy with heart, this film by Anne Fletcher is unfortunately short …
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HollywoodandFine.com Michael Haneke has always been a little too bloodless as a filmmaker, for my taste. There is a distance – and a coldness – to his work, an almost clinical feel, like a scientist tracking the path of rats through a maze. He creates uncomfortable situations and lets them …
HollywoodandFine.com My heart sank when I heard that Peter Jackson, having already made the greatest fantasy trilogy of all time in “The Lord of the Rings,” was going back to the well once more, this time taking the reins of “The Hobbit” from Guillermo del Toro. And then that it …
HollywoodandFine.com Travis Fine’s “Any Day Now’ is set in the late 1970s, but, with its story about a gay couple battling to adopt an unwanted child, it could just as easily be set in the current day. It’s one of the few films being released Dec. 14 (in limited release), …
HollywoodandFine.com Roger Michell’s “Hyde Park on Hudson” is half a good movie. When it focuses on the quirks and manipulations of international events, it crackles and pops – and when it turns its attention to the soap-operatic romance, it settles into a dull hum. Based on real events, Richard Nelson’s …